Hektor wrote:hermod wrote:Whodunnit? wrote:I don't think there is a calculus behind it, the post-war social engineering got legs and now it's running wild. The works of today's German historians is often so full of vitriol that it appears like this bitterness is the main driver for their work. They want to "dismantle" everything that might be perceived as positive about pre-liberation Germany, and confirm their favorite version of reality, where the Nazis were insane criminals, the Germans were mentally deficient people, the war was lost from the beginning and the allies only did nothing wrong, in the end Germany was liberated and so on. But the thing I want to mention is that you don't only find it in professional works, you can also find it in things like master theses, so it has taken on a life of it's own.
The All Lies of WWI had painfully experienced what happens to a victor's diktats & war booty when he lets his best propaganda lies go to waste after victory. So their kids devised a strategy of psychological warfare during WWII to prevent such a "tragedy" from happening again...
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Indeed, but it also depended who of the Allies did do what their.
* The Soviet Stance was essentially agitprop. Which is why most of their atrocity propaganda is essentially rather blunt and contains stories that are noticeable made up. But whenever people hear a big lie often enough, they may not believe the big lie, but it opens them up to believe smaller lies... It's something con-scams do work with as well. Think of snake-oil salesmen. They praise their product to be healing anything, use testimony to support it. And while people may doubt the super-power of this product, they still may think that it will help with their stomach pain.
* The American stance was perhaps the most professional in this. The Psychological Warfare Division, but the whole WAR-PR departments did higher highly professional individuals in the form of psychologists and sociologists. And they also followed a very 'taylorist' scientific management approach in this. Meaning they frequently measured the effect of their propaganda efforts through surveys and interviews.
* For the British it was merely an extension of atrocity propaganda with the evil huns narrative. They just weren't as crude in this during and after ww2.
* The French were the least professional... It's the most half-baked of them all. For them WW2 was rather embarrassing anyway. They were defeated, partially occupied. And French were rather ready to make concessions with the Germans there. So it was more about the "French Resistance Myth" for them. And they were eager to gaslight the Alsatians as well.
* Communists and the Left in general... pushed it mostly as "Antifascism" meaning movements that fight the cosmopolitan or internationalist left must be somehow evil to do so. Obvious motive was discredit any opponents for good in the time after WW2.
* Jewish interest groups instilled a victim narrative for Jews and a 'perpetrator narrative' for anyone that dares to criticize them.
* Meanwhile there are liberal and conservative or rather cuckservative narratives as well.
* Oh yes, the Catholics also had their victim narratives there. After all there were priests in concentration camps. That those priests were actually imprisoned for other reasons than their religion they don't mention. Some of the imprisoned priests were actually pedophiles and rather embarassing, while others were politically affiliated e.g. with Polish Chauvinists. The NAZIS persecuted Catholics narrative was however the perfect distraction from the embarrassing details of priests imprisoned for reasons of sexual misconduct as well as involvement in germanophobe movements... It was suitable to some, since most Germans were Protestants and only a minority was Catholic.
* On the Protestant side it was actually a bit of a problem, since most Protestant actually supported NS or at least tried to be neutral. There was strive internally in the church over theological issues. E.g. the role of government, nation, culture, etc. The NS-Welfare organizations were also seen as competitor for church welfare programs. There was also the 'confessing church', which is a bit of a misnomer. And some of the member did support NS politically, while having an issue with political interference in the church. Misnomer, because figures like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer wanted 'another Christianity' themselves. Barth was a Marxist sympathizer and quite open about that, while Bonhoeffer was sort of a postmodernist. Given what he wrote about 'attractive man' in his private letters, I suspect that he had an issue with heteronormativity as well. The majority of active German Protestants remained pietists after WW2, but their influence within the Protestant Churches was marginal... It is the Barthian and liberal/post-modern theologians that dominate the scene. Bonhoeffer was executed for treason and corruption and not for 'being a faithful Christian' as is often implied. Barth had a role in the "Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis" something that was done, before anything could have been known with certainty.... Essentially the church gave a blank cheque for 'German collective Guilt' that way opening the path for further gas lighting. Their path ahead wasn't exactly blessed, they depend more on government subsidies than ever before and they lost about half of their membership... Who are 'vaccinated against Christianity'... When they hear Christian, they think of politically correct hypocrites that can't be taken seriously, because they are literal fools without any sense of realism. This also had an impact of 'Christianity globally' since a lot of academic theology is influenced from Germany.
Oh yes, Bonhoeffer was communicating with Adolph Willem Visser t'Hooft a lot. A leftist Protestant that had a leading role in the 'ecumenical movement' as well as someone connected to the world of intelligence services. Conservative Christians view them as globalists in sheep's clothing and that for good reason. The support that they gave for even terrorist organizations is rather shocking. That affair was exposed in "Rotbuch Kirche" by pietist theologians. Not all in the Protestant churches were happy about what Protestantism has turned into. Today they are essentially the pioneers for any idea of the postmodern or pinkish left. Diminished credibility and it is also good that way. They are a motor of degeneracy, while controlling the group activities of a large portion of Christians.
Finally there is of course academic historiography and there you only 'become something' if you tow the party-line, which isn't written or official, but one finds out rather quickly that certain dogmata and paradigms rather remain unquestioned.
First I'd like to share my impressions of German historians. I give one example. In the pre-Wikipedia days (this will be important), I had a discussion with a "German historian" in an internet forum. Back then "historians" in my opinion occupied history forums with the mission of leading people down the right path, and preventing them from finding the wrong rabbit hole where at the end they would turn into Nazis. According to my experience, this has been a policy since the internet became open to everybody. The guy worked in some "archive" and apparently was a real historian with all credentials. He told me that before 1871, Germany didn't really exist. It was more like the Balkans. The people couldn't even understand one another since they all spoke strong dialects, there was no common national identity, no common history. After the napoleonic wars, and especially since the mid 19th century, he Prussians then made up a German history and identity, they copied and pasted it from the french, and of course their goal was just to build a huge empire, so world conquest. I was dumbfounded.
I replied that this is not true, that 1871 was the beginning of a German nation STATE, but that the nation was one of the oldest in Europe and had existed since at least 811, probably long before. He immediately accused me of being a closet Nazi, peddling nazi myths. Back then I was pretty much a typical early-aughts liberal, but I was just mentioning facts.
Then Wikipedia came along. Why is that important? Because on Wikipedia you could in fact read long articles about the very facts I just mentioned. As much as Wikipedia nowadays is a propaganda tool, it at least killed this alternative reality that this guy was trying to make people believe in.
Now here is the perfidious thing about this version of history.
What he told me did in fact happen in the mid 19th century, but not in Germany. This is what happened in many eastern European states that for a long time had been ruled by either Germans, Russians or Turks. These were the "national revoval"-movements of the 19th century and all of them arose in opposition to cultural hegemony of foreign people, Germanification- or Russification-policies, and the resurgence of national identity in politics. That means that in Slovenia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in particular, these movements were anti-German. At the beginning of the 19th century, those regions had been multilingual, and the languages that now are their national languages were taken from rural dialects and supplemented, and harmonized by using old texts, although partially, some of the vocabulary was artificially created (for the Czech language, research Josef Jungmann). Tolkien did something similar for Lord Of The Rings. They also made up parts of their history, and this led to a fantasical irrendentism where some of the nationalists dreamt of the recreation of lost empires that in some cases never existed. The Germans on the other hand considered themselves an ancient people, and they had, for example, the Nibelungen-saga to show for it. So an attempt was made to find something to counter that. High culture, classical music in particular, became nationalistic, leading to the french developing an anti-Wagnerian, hence anti-German, style of music. A lot of forgeries of "re-discovered national myths" circulated (see the czech "rukopis zelenohorský" for example).
This was a part of the national socialist policy. The question was: who are these people in regions that are partially slavic, partially german? Are Sudetengermans, Czechs, Silesians germanized Slavs or slavicized Germans?
So anyhow, it apparently became part of the denazificating social engineering to take the view that the Nazis had of the eastern Europeans and turn in against them. So the Germans are the people who made their identity up, and everyody else's national identity goes back to ancient times. Their country was the swampy marches inhabited by peasants that only cared about their little village.
And considering the allied propaganda: I get the feeling that all of allies portrayed the Germans as their own bad self, basically a scapegoat for their sins. So for the Russian, "Generalplan Ost" was intended to do to them what they did to the eastern Germans and what they had also done to the people that are colloqially called Tatars. For the Americans, and you can read this in Brendan Simms "Hitler - only the world was enough", they followed the racial views of people like Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, and they saw the Slavs as a mixture of negros and indians, and this was the fate they envisioned for them . For the British, they wanted to pursue their own collonial policy in Europe, but of course, only the ugly part of it. They were in fact influenced especially by anglo-saxon writers, eugenics and racial views, but the main point I want to bring up, the impression I got from reading the allegations and charges at the Nuremberg trials, is that they wanted to kick off a new, anti-collonial, anti-racists era, and for that sake used the Germans as scapegoats in the religious sense - load your sins onto them, and then punish them for it.
Oh, and when somebody brings up that Hitler was anti-christian, because there were a some anticlerical policies - just look up Heinrich Maier of CASSIA. A lot of clerics were traitors. In foreign countries, priests peddled anti-German propaganda and called for partisan activity, something that historically was not uncommon. Just look uo this fine piece of italian B-movie Horror:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_ ... i_Division Witness here is Padre Romualdo Formato. Priests back the weren't these preachers of pazifism and "turning the other cheek", in many wars it was the village priest that riled the people up to take up arms. Shooting the village priest often pacified a village
